Portfolio Update

I was able to harvest some shares of SDY and VYM today at a reasonable capital gains tax cost, and plowed the proceeds, plus a good chunk of stored up dividends I've been saving for the better part of this year, into more shares of General Mills (GIS), Vodafone (VOD) and Dominion (D). The move increased dividends for the portfolio by a very healthy amount, taking the portfolio income growth up by just slightly under 1%. This places the portfolio dividend growth at nearly 3.5% faster than the dividend growth for all three of portfolio benchmarks combined - (VBINX), (VTI) and (VT). The reason for the timing of these investments is that I oftentimes confuse periods with commas, and I have been misreading a cash balance in one of my accounts by three decimal points for the last few months.

In today's world of auto-spell and grammar checks, the day-to-day consequences of dyslexia are either trivial, non-detectable or even non-existent. Not only that, after you've been alive for nearly half a century, you develop any number of effective workarounds (and so do the people around you). When I am driving, for example, my friends know not to say "turn to the right" or "turn to the left" but rather "head towards that red car" or "turn away from the white house." But there are still areas that seem to be impossible to reliably cope with: greater-than versus less-than symbols, colon versus semi-colon, forward-slash versus backward-slash symbols and, last but far from least, commas versus periods. But needless to say, I am much happier with a number like $1,000 than a number like $1.00, so you won't hear me complaining too loudly (but I can assure you that the time I paid my credit card company $30,000 one month instead of $3,000 was much, much less fun).

Fortunately, I feel like I am far more comfortable with questions about stock prices than I am with punctuation symbols. The portfolio typically does better than the overall market when prices are falling (today, in fact, the portfolio is modestly higher compared to a broad slump in global markets). The annual Alpha against (VT) briefly touched 10% today, and 7% against (VTI).

I expect some additional dividends to come through Friday or early next week, and will look to put those to work by investing in more shares of Lockheed Martin (LMT).

The allocations are as follows:

Disclosure: I am/we are long VOD.

Additional disclosure: I am not an investment advisor and this is not investment advice. I am long every stock in the attached spreadsheet, and these comprise all positions I own in any portfolios.